Friday, April 28, 2017

I continue with more new literature headed our way. These titles are intriguing, even exciting, and cover the literary landscape from the RCAF of the Chicano Movement, to Papi and the Boston Red Sox, to a much-anticipated memoir from an author who unfailingly satisfies critics, educators and, most importantly, readers: Sherman Alexie. Hope you find something you want to add to your library.

[from the publisher]The Royal Chicano Air Force produced major works of visual art, poetry, prose, music, and performance during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first. Materializing in Sacramento, California, in 1969 and established between 1970 and 1972, the RCAF helped redefine the meaning of artistic production and artwork to include community engagement projects such as breakfast programs, community art classes, and political and labor activism. The collective's work has contributed significantly both to Chicano/a civil rights activism and to Chicano/a art history, literature, and culture.

Blending RCAF members' biographies and accounts of their artistic production with art historical, cultural, and literary scholarship, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force is the first in-depth study of this vanguard Chicano/a arts collective and activist group. Ella Maria Diaz investigates how the RCAF questioned and countered conventions of Western art, from the canon taught in US institutions to Mexican national art history, while advancing a Chicano/a historical consciousness in the cultural borderlands. In particular, she demonstrates how women significantly contributed to the collective's output, navigating and challenging the overarching patriarchal cultural norms of the Chicano Movement and their manifestations in the RCAF. Diaz also shows how the RCAF's verbal and visual architecture—a literal and figurative construction of Chicano/a signs, symbols, and texts—established the groundwork for numerous theoretical interventions made by key scholars in the 1990s and the twenty-first century.

Ella Maria Diaz is an assistant professor of English and Latino/a Studies at Cornell University. She has published in Aztlán: The Journal of Chicano Studies, Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, and U.C. Santa Barbara’s Imaginarte e-publications.

[from the publisher]Tia Chucha Press is proud to present an anthology of Central American writers living in the United States. It features work that captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latino groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a U.S. publisher, perfect for high school, college, or university courses in U.S. literature, Latino literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies.

A multi-genre collection—including poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction—the book showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences, as refugees from the wars of the 1980s to those who barely remember the homeland or who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. Yet it is a community that shares a history of violence—both here and back home—and the hope and healing that ensures its survival. They include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.

[from the publisher]Coronado National Memorial explores forgotten pathways through Montezuma Canyon in southeastern Arizona and provides an essential history of the southern Huachuca Mountains. This is a magical place that shaped the region and two countries, the United States and Mexico. Its history dates back to the expedition led by Conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1540, a mere 48 years after Columbus’ first voyage. Before that time Native Americans occupied the land, later to bejoined by Spanish and Mexican period miners and ranchers, prospecting entrepreneurs, missionaries and homesteaders.Joseph Sánchez is the foremost historian of the area, and he shifts through and decodes a number of key Spanish and English language documents from different archives that tell the story of an historical drama of epic proportions. He combines the regional and the global, starting with the prehistory of the area. He covers Spanish colonial contact, settlement missions, the Mexican Territorial period, land grants, and the ultimate formation of the international border that set the stage for the creation of the Coronado National Memorial in 1952.

Much has been written about southwestern Arizona and northeastern Sonora, and in many ways this book complements those efforts and delivers fresh and illuminating details about the region’s colorful past.

Joseph P. Sánchez worked for the National Park Service for 35 years. He is the founder of the Spanish Colonial Research Center at University of New Mexico, and founding editor of Colonial Latin American Historical Review. He is the author of several books, including most recently, Early Hispanic Colorado, 1678-1900. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.

[from the publisher]An entertaining, unfiltered memoir by one of the game’s greatest, most clutch sluggers and beloved personalities.

David “Big Papi” Ortiz is a baseball icon and one of the most popular figures ever to play the game. As a key part of the Boston Red Sox for 14 years, David has helped the team win 3 World Series, bringing back a storied franchise from “never wins” to “always wins.” He helped them upend the doubts, the naysayers, the nonbelievers and captured the imagination of millions of fans along the way, as he launched balls into the stands again, and again, and again. He made Boston and the Red Sox his home, his place of work, and his legacy. As he put it: This is our f*&#ing city.

Now, looking back at the end of his legendary career, Ortiz opens up fully for the first time about his last two decades in the game. Unhindered by political correctness, Ortiz talks colorfully about his journey, from his poor upbringing in the Dominican Republic to when the expansion Florida Marlins passed up a chance to sign him due to what was essentially tennis elbow. He recalls his days in Peoria, Arizona, his first time in the United States; tense exchanges with Twins manager Tom Kelly in Minnesota; and his arrival in Boston. Readers go behind the scenes for the many milestones of his Red Sox career— from the huge disappointment of the Red Sox losing to the Yankees in 2003, ending the curse in 2004 with the infamous “band of idiots," including his extraordinary clutch hitting to overcome a 3-0 series deficit against the Yankees, to earning a second title in 2007 and a third in 2013. Along the way, he was tainted by the infamous banned substances list in 2009; he used his passion and place to fortify a city devastated by the Boston Marathon bombings; and he dominated pitchers right up through his retirement season at age 40. Papi, as he became so affectionately called, gave his fans big hits when they needed them most. He was an even bigger presence: He was a champion who rallied a team, a city, and a sport in a way that no one will ever forget.

In Papi, his ultimate memoir, Ortiz opens up as never before about his life in baseball and about the problems he sees in Major League Baseball, about former teammates, opponents, coaches, and executives, and about the weight of expectation whenever he stepped up to the plate. The result is a revelatory, fly-on-the wall story of a career by a player with a lot to say at the end of his time in the game, a game to which he gave so much and which gave so much to him. David Ortiz, nicknamed "Big Papi," is a ten-time major league All-Star,
three-time World Series champion, and the all-time MLB record holder for
home runs, RBIs, and hits by a designated hitter. In 2015, Ortiz was
voted as one of the four greatest players in Boston Red Sox
history—along with Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, and Pedro Martinez—by
Red Sox fans. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Michael Holley is the New York Times best-selling author of Patriot
Reign, War Room, and Red Sox Rule. A former reporter and columnist for
the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune, Holley has also appeared on ESPN's
popular show Around the Horn and on Fox Sports Net's I, MAX. He is
currently a host of WEEI's popular radio show Dale & Holley._________________________________________________________________________

[from the publisher]A career-spanning volume charting the Nobel laureate’s work in the ode form.

Pablo Neruda
was a master of the ode, which he conceived as an homage to just about
everything that surrounded him, from an artichoke to the clouds in the
sky, from the moon to his own friendship with Federico García Lorca
and his favorite places in Chile. He was in his late forties when he
committed himself to writing an ode a week, and in the end he produced a
total of 225, which are dispersed throughout his varied oeuvre. This
bilingual volume, edited by Ilan Stavans, a distinguished
translator and scholar of Latin American literature, gathers all
Neruda’s odes for the first time in any language. Rendered into English by an assortment of accomplished translators, including Philip Levine, Paul Muldoon, Mark Strand, and Margaret Sayers Peden,
collectively they read like the personal diary of a man in search of
meaning who sings to life itself, to our connections to one another, and
to the place we have in nature and the cosmos. All the Odes is also a lasting statement on the role of poetry as a lightning rod during tumultuous times.______________________________________________________________________

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A MemoirSherman AlexieLittle, Brown and Company - June [from the publisher]A
searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness
from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning
author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Family
relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his
mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into
chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the
brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but
created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for
strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the
affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for
her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to
achieve it. It's these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a
beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human
woman.

When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his
mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the
haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only
way he knew how: he wrote. The result is a stunning memoir filled with
raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can
imagine, much less survive. An unflinching and unforgettable
remembrance, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a powerful, deeply
felt account of a complicated relationship. A National Book Award-winning author, poet, and filmmaker, Sherman Alexie has
been named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and has been
lauded by The Boston Globe as "an important voice in American
literature." He is one of the most well known and beloved literary
writers of his generation, with works such as The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heavenand Reservoir Blues
and has received numerous awards and citations, including the
PEN/Malamud Award for Fiction and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest
Award. _____________________________________________________________________ Later.Manuel Ramosis the author of several novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction books and articles. His collection of short stories, The Skull of Pancho Villa and Other Stories, was a finalist for the 2016 Colorado Book Award.My Bad: A Mile High Noirwas published by Arte Público Press in 2016.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Look
out, world! Here's a manifestation of La Cultura that will give the
President's absurd performance art, the design contest for the Border
Wall, and the Mother of All Bombs some serious competition:
Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and PopularCulture edited by Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B.V. Olguín.
It's got a cover that riffs on a classic Jesús Helguera painting,
making it into sexy space opera. The UCLA Chicano Studies Research
Center calls it “The first collection engaging Chicana/o and
Latina/o speculative cultural production.” And it's over 500 pages.

It
includes my “Chicanonautica Manifesto” where I say things like:
“I'm not interested in being puro Mexicano and only reaching the
gente in the barrio. My roots embrace the planet, and reach out for
the universe—the Intergalactic Barrio.”

There's
also Daoine S. Bachran's “From Code to Codex: Tricksterizing the
Digital Divide in Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues” and
other essays that discuss and mention my work. Makes me look like
some kind of Latinoid literary chingón. Hmm, maybe there's something
to this Father of Chicano science fiction stuff, after all?

This
ain't no dull, academic tome. This is what's been going on as
Latinoid culture rides the waves of future shock, sending fractures
through Latinoid/Chicano art and science/speculative fiction. It's
also the way the world is going, the culture of the 21st
century and beyond. Civilization as we know it will not be the same.
And it's good non-fiction companion to the other fiction anthologies that
have been coming out lately.

A foto on Facebook brought back warm memories. There were Greta Pullen and Carlos Vazquez smiling out at the lens. I last saw Greta and Carlos at the 2014 Rudolfo Anaya academic conference Roberto Cantu organized at Cal State Los Angeles. It was a joyous reunion.

Pullen and Vazquez, along with Katie Trujillo, organized a decade of National Latino Writers Conferences, cementing a reputation for the National Hispanic Cultural Center (link) as a pre-eminent cultural incubator.

Seeing Greta and Carlos on the screen was a remembrance of good things gone too soon. The National Latino Writers Conference brought important raza writers, literary agents, and emerging writers into a paradise for writers. The event sparkled with spirit and sense of purpose, enhanced by the physical plant of the National Hispanic Cultural Center.

Times are tough in the land of enchantment, forcing NHCC's shift from identifying itself as an important cultural institution to a role as a regional entertainment venue. That should work in a high-culture deprived market, but I hope the director and staff get more out of the effort than they put in. It's a courageous undertaking. I hope also the gente on top open their hearts and squeeze a few thousand dollars out of the Off-Broadway road shows to resume hosting latina latino writers. A cultural center, especially one named for a gente, should be a place to nurture cultura, as well as display it.

I am following the evolution of the National Hispanic Cultural Center with concern. Recently reorganized in a changing of the guardians, the center took on the ethos of an entertainment center that keeps itself funded selling tickets and subscriptions to a mix of local productions and a steady diet of traveling acts, often those who rent the auditorium and put on their own show, a "four wall" production.

Entertainment programming takes a high risk for a middling return. But hit big with an audience and count the revenue as income rolls in from donations, subscriptions, individual seats, collateral spending, and customer loyalty. That’s how it works. Make a product, sell the product, satisfy customers. Then do it again.

NHCC survives facing off against an arts-hating governor who atavistically watches all the state’s cultural institutions twist slowly in the wind. They're going to have to make it on their own. Hijole, there’s no wonder major art acquisitions are a rarity at NHCC. Curators mount exhibitions from the art museum's stunning collection. This rich resource lets the museum fashion new themes out of familiar canvases and work rescued from the vault. Another strategy is long-running exhibitions.

An exhibition on the patron saint of farmers, Outstanding in His Field: San Ysidro—Patron Saint of Farmers, runs now, through the harvest. Curating on a shrinking subsistence budget must be daunting to people who care about art. They send out resumes.

Renting out the hall pays bills but it’s doubtful even the governor would want to see NHCC rent out one of its multiple performance spaces to cualquier tipo just to fill the calendar.

The impresario promoting NHCC’s season pursues bright lights, big city entertainment lineups. In March, for instance, the center drew a sold-out audience the night Pussy Riot performed the world premiere warm-up for its upcoming world premiere in Seattle. An Elvis impersonator rented the venue for a one-night stand in April. The Philharmonic—they rent the hall as their home auditorium—satisfies with a steady diet of sweeps week music featuring up-and-coming virtuosi soloists.

There are food events, readings, crafts sales, workshops, gallery walks, and the myriad experiences that draw people to a place; couples for a big night out, families for an afternoon’s low-cost and educational recreation. A visit to the woefuly underplayed el Torreón is reason enough to detour off Interstate 25 at Ave. César Chavez and visit the arts center when in Alburquerque.

The National Hispanic Cultural Center is a gem of a cultural destination but it’s also the nation’s best-kept secret. United Statesians are hungry for affirmation, raza are starved for inclusion. The National Hispanic Cultural Center has a lot of what it takes to satisfy.

Pero, sabes que? There’s a major emptiness in Alburquerque. What is missing from NHCC’s cornucopia of cultural delights is a writers conference. For ten years, NHCC’s National Latino Writers Conference admitted a small number of emerging writers to workshop various genres and issues with professional writers, meet with publishers and literary agents, hone their art. For three years, I workshopped “Reading Your Own Stuff,” with the goal of helping writers become more effective oral presenters of their own work.

The National Latino Writers Conference went by the wayside with a staff change-over a couple years ago. Chisme probably fills books over that but I don’t know anything I didn’t read in the board minutes. I lost track of the NHCC when NLWC went away and after a year, didn't renew my membership.

Over the years I saw a musical chairs game of new guys in charge. I met three of them, I couldn’t really figure them out, organization men, not arts people. The new leader is a woman, Rebecca L. Avitia. It’s her vision that drives the programming and audience strategy. She has to answer to the Board. Above all, she has to turn her cultural centro into an active, busy, modern theater. The rest is gravy, or goes away.

2010 NLWC Writers

Avitia and her NHCC board need to reignite the center’s commitment to literacy and training writers, as a way of investing in their raison d'etre as a cultural centro or an entertainment destination. For sure, nothing gets on stage until someone writes it down. A libretto doesn’t write itself. A nonverbal dance performance follows a written score. Every movie and film started with words on paper and after every day’s filming someone sat down and revised tomorrow’s lines. It’s ironic in a sad way that a cultural center riding the coattails of talented writers isn’t proactive about nurturing writing.

It’s a bitter realization that when our cultural institutions don’t support our own writers, pues, peor. Writers and critics struggle to foster a culture of written expression, banging at the doors at AWP, starting their own presses, managing their own blogs. The noble struggle will go on, only without the national cultural centro. And that’s a lástima.

Years from now, historians will look back and wonder why New Mexico and the Nationial Hispanic Cultural Center abandoned writing, how NHCC didn’t find its way back to the NLWC. They shot our cultura in the foot. Rhetoricians will ask after the ethos of the place, how the institution made profits on spectacles and reinvested in more of the same without diverting a sum to support a renewed NLWC. How the institution recruited donors for highbrow endeavors but couldn’t scrape up the funding equivalent of a penny for the old guy.

Eliot’s vision of “Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion” is what glittery stage happenings are, without writing. They don’t happen. Taking care to nurture and advance writers guarantees the possibility of having new spectacles to lure ticket-buying audiences. Avitia’s got her work cut out for her. I wish her energy and staff to accomplish all that, and one more goal next year: renacimiento of the National Latino Writers Conference.

NLWC writers 2012

Sponsoring the rebirth of NLWC defines a distinctiveness and importance for NHCC, an important step for NHCC recovering its national stature no matter how the political winds twist. I have a vision of talented raza writers walking across the broad plaza rushing to a seminar, smiling at the sound of the acequia's agua gushing into the pool. There's also a vision of those artists today, standing at the gates of the NHCC, shaking the bars and angrily kicking at the gates wanting to be included, wondering why they got kicked out in the first place?

Bless Me, Ultima Opera Premiere Scheduled for February 2018

La Bloga has followed with interest developing news of an opera based on Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima. In January 2017, La Bloga-Tuesday (link) featured an interview with the opera's creator Héctor Armienta. Performance dates were still pending as Armienta was still finishing the music.

Recently La Bloga friend Teresa Márquez shared the good news Armienta, Opera Southwest, and the NHCC have set a date for a workshop performance in February 2018. The company has hosted tryouts and workshops in San Jose, CA and is taking the show on the road for the first time.

This premiere creates the ideal opportunity to visit New Mexico in Winter, both to enjoy the state’s spectacular landscapes and to see the work in progress for Héctor Armienta’s opera, Bless Me, Ultima.

Ticket-buyers don’t have to wear tuxedoes or evening dress to opera productions, but it’s likely some tipas and tipos like to show for the opera all dressed up in their Thursday best, especially February 18 for the first night. Others will be equally well turned-out through the Sunday matinee on the 25th. I wear my Pendleton or a sweatshirt when I go to an LA Opera spectacular. Placido and crew don’t care, as long as I enjoy the show.

Opera is a genuine visual and aural treat, with a few conventions about when to applaud and stuff, that someone inevitably miscues and gets dirty looks from the cognoscenti. Raza can be cognoscenti, too. Just be there and dig it. And dig it you will.

A night at the opera is fun so long as one remembers it's the “u” in fun that counts. Wrap yourself in the music—the power of the human body to produce sound will be a punch in the gut to some. Ultima’s cast features a 14-year old boy singer. This could be the launch of a major career.

In opera, the story, humor, melodies, and visual riches like sets, costumes, lighting and staging can be enchanting. I don’t know if the Producers plan on supertitles so listeners can read the words in Armienta’s English-language libretto. Subscriptions are open now. Individual seats go on sale in July.

Los Angeles Theater Center is a theater multiplex of five performance spaces joined to a luxurious marble-walled grand hall and lobby. The descent to the basement rest rooms takes visitors along a massive bank vault. Remodeled stairs to the balcony feature half inch thick glass and stainless steel rails. the balustrade overlooking the lobby gives unobstructed vistas of the huge and luxurious space.

The LATC is a great place for theater and a fabulous place for a poetry slam competition among teams from local high schools. That's what drew me to Spring Street early Thursday and Friday morning. Lend a hand with administrative chores and share the energy of dozens of Get Lit staffers and a thousand or more kids gathering to perform or cheer on their spoken word artists.

GetLit Classic Slam follows a wondrous format. The contestant chooses a poem by a well-known poet and writes a response poem. The contestant knits the two with narrative, working from memory to meet a time limit. It's a beautiful way to link generations by remembering in one's own voice good work from another time.

Rachel Kilroy put me to work at the merchandise table where I would sell "Poet" merchandise. A jumble of colors, sizes, styles, teeshirts, tank tops, sweatshirts, beanies, filled plastic storage bins. Git Lit's first book is hot off the presses, and several boxes wait under the table skirts. Rachel's mother is there. Later I meet her dad. The family that supports literacy and oracy together make up just three of the dozens of volunteers and paid staff bustling through the lobby, theatres, and outside foyer, getting the crowd set to make a beeline for their seat.

Thursday, I worked with one other volunteer. Friday three knowledgeable women took over. Two, who were mothers of contestants, and a retired high school English teacher, organized the garments, folding and laying them out across twenty feet of table space. I hope the clean-up crew labeled those stacks before moving them to the bins and transport to the finals on Sunday.

Thursday and Friday, school teams competed in the quarter-finals and semi-finals. The winners move to the final competition, this year taking place in the opulence of the Orpheum movie house.

Registration keeps the kids outside as the coaches sign in and take a bag of credentials outside to waiting and cheering teams. A signal from Get Lit executives Diane Luby Lane or Amanda Pittman and the lobby doors fill with excited kids thronging toward their stage. There, an MC whips up enthusiasm before introducing the first contestant.

A panel of judges scores the panel of competitors. A few get selected to compete in the day's second round of competition, the afternoon's semi-finals.

The Get Lit experience cannot be matched by any other competitive activity. Reciting and performing spoken words to audiences of hundreds of peers produces pure exhilaration. At the end, the kid walks off stage into the waiting arms of the team.

For finalists, the experience of taking the Orpheum stage to a screaming full house will make all the work of honing the performance into a winner worth it. And it is.

Teams and individuals pose in front of a Get Lit seamless. An official photographer is there to document every team.

When the formal pose is done, the cell phones come out for exuberant selfies.

Get Lit published its first collection of work by Get Lit participants. A single copy sells for fifteen dollars at the venue. For details, click here. I sold one person the show special, 10 books for a hundred dollars. In addition, Get Lit would donate ten books to a participating high school, or a school of the customer's naming.

My heart went out to the schools who prepared for the competition but didn't make it to LA on time. On Friday morning, two forlorn registration bags lay tossed behind a sign. Maybe those teams can find a donor to pay for an overnight stay in DTLA. These kids and their coaches deserve a night in the big city.

“Untitled” by Chuck Cuyjet
“Alive, Burning” by Devi S. Laskar
“winds of the West murmurs” by Jolaoso PrettyThunder
"mother of all bombs" by Jenuine Poetess
“Dear Pepsi” by Get Christie Love

“Untitled”by Chuck Cuyjet

We woke up 49 years ago and the world was on fire. Today we wake to gassed children and wonder...
Someone asked the question
Who raised these crazed men
who gas children
who poison our air
who pour filth into our water
who fill our schools
with ignorance called knowledge
and who pontificate on their
own greatness?
We did.
No, of course not.
We shield
our loved offspring
with our own bodies
and love.
We teach them to respect
themselves, our values,
to work hard, to look
out for the other fella,
to protect our tribe,
And honor our god.
But as we look across
oceans, into the
hearts of darkness,
as we rattle our self righteous
swords, do we seek justice
or vengeance, or glory?
The riches the few gather
befoul their souls yet
in our secret selves
we envy them their ease
and never question
the cost.
So we replicate it
in our screams and calls
to our god to punish
them and reward us,
the good fathers and mothers
who have no sin, no stain
for we gas no children
in our warm houses
in winter and cool our frosty
asses on patios in the summer
sipping tea with ice cubes
rum drinks mixed with faux
concern of deaths so far away.
We don't gas children
We starve their souls
with the contempt for those
we arm.

Alive, Burning by Devi S. Laskar

Burn everything to the bone.
Start clean and again will rise
hibiscus, diesel, dung, mango
mingling with night skin in this taxi.
Start clean and again will rise
a rw odor of green—
mingling with night skin in this taxi.
Money, envy, hunger filling the air.
A raw odor of green—
cauliflower patches and cabbage replace the landfill.
Money, envy, hunger filling the air.
From garbage grows food, from thieves spring farmers.
Cauliflower patches and cabbage replace the landfill.
The road hooks like shoelaces around shantytowns.
From garbage grows food, from thieves spring farmers.
All you see are red clay roofs and jaded faces.
The road hooks like shoelaces around shantytowns.
On his dashboard the driver keeps a statue of Durga.
All you see are red clay roofs and jaded faces.
The bronzed feet of this goddess of war will never touch the ground.
On his dashboard the driver keeps a statue of Durga.
But for my American dollar I would be you.
The bronzed feet of this goddess of war will never touch the ground,
pounding a rich man’s laundry on stones by a man-made lake.
But for my American dollar I would be you
eating food off the sooty plate of the street,
pounding a rich man’s laundry on stones by a man-made lake
alive and filled with resentment and wonder.
Eating food off the sooty plate of the street --
hibiscus, diesel, dung, mango,
alive and filled with resentment and wonder.
Burning everything to the bone.

winds of the West murmursby Jolaoso PrettyThunder

we summon you winds
of the West,
mother sister Jaguar,
come protect our medicine space
hunt down and devour those energies that do not belong to us,
teach us your ways beyond fear beyond anger beyond death,
beyond guilt,
beyond shame,
beyond all the mythologies and beliefs that no longer serve us.

teach us to be impeccable luminous beings who have no need
to engage in battle,
internally or eternally,
unless we choose to.

help us to be able to support ourselves and
have the ability to ask for and receive what we desire
so that we may step into who we are becoming.

"mother of all bombs"by Jenuine Poetess

you cannot call a bomb
"mother"
mother is one
of any gender
who protects life
who gives life
who cherishes life
who nurtures life
who sustains life
who fosters life
who celebrates life
who empowers life
who cultivates life
who nourishes life
who heals life
you cannot call that
which destroys
which kills
which carves scars into the flesh
of people
of villages
of Earth
"mother"
do not poison such a word
with your filthy
greedy
murderous
treachery
no bomb is a mother

Dear Pepsiby get christie love

Dear Pepsi
If you want to be a product of the revolution
Then send yourself into the fray,
Get gassed and pepper sprayed get trampled
Become marginalized and scary
Become irrelevant then made into a fetish.

There are steps involved and you haven't followed even the first rule of a revolt.
Say
Something.

Are you for all lives matter, against women who receive lower wages and
Yes you hired the tatted up gurl with the weave to deliver soda but,
Wait,
Nevermind
That was coke.

Pepsi,
If you wanted a March you should have
Sponsored one.
If you wanted product placement you should have sent
The Million men to the March on
Pepsi buses.
Given away pink pussy hats with every
Case of pop sold or
Maybe pink cans with cat ears.

You could have sent backpacks to underfunded schools or
Put Pepsi swirls on the drum kits at HBCU'S

Pepsi if you want to be a product of the revolution
Why send the most generic culturally ambiguous person alive-
No ass
That flat
Ever created a civilization

Dear Pepsi
if you want to
Be a product of the revolution,
Write your manifesto on a spool of aluminum
Then send it to factory for cutting into cans.
Then tell the people to talk to each other, ask each person to post
Hashtag-
'What part did you get'?

Pepsi,
No jenner, no Kardashian, no trump
Will ever be culturally relevant to any group who ever needed a spokesmodel.
Madonna at least
Would drink the Pepsi then lift her leg to pee it out on the boot of a stormtrooper.

Dear Pepsi
To be a product of the revolution,
You will need more than stolen recycled images from Vietnam protests

You will need a legacy of
Conscious thinking,
And permission from water protectors
There is water in Pepsi, right?

Fly Pepsi to Syria for
A photo op-
And see if I don't
Drive it all back in my chevy.

Dare me
Be daring

Corporate redundancy
Lack of imagination
Lazy marketing

Zero empathy
Zero taste
Zero filling
Zero flavor

You managed to anti revolt.
And you spent a lot of money on
Air.

La Bloga On-line Floricanto April 25

“Untitled” by Chuck Cuyjet

“Alive, Burning” by Devi S. Laskar

“winds of the West murmurs” by Jolaoso PrettyThunder

"mother of all bombs" by Jenuine Poetess

“Dear Pepsi” by Get Christie Love

Chuck Cuyjet. I'm a sixty-nine year old leadership and executive coach. I grew up in Philadelphia, went to college at The University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Over the last decade or so I've featured at Busboys and Poets here in the DC area, but my primary focus with my writing is essay and memoir. The opening lines of the poem reference what it was like waking up the morning after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Currently living in the DC Metro area and raising two children. .

get_christie_love (YPK) performs poetry in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor Ontario. She began writing on the Def Jam Poetry message board in 2002, where she connected with a Detroit poet, Legacy Leonard (may peace be with her), and was invited to read poetry at her first open mic reading.. She taught herself how to use MIcrosoft Publisher and began creating Chapbooks to sell and trade. She founded OpenAir Publishing in 2004 which has produced 7 chapbooks to date. In October 2014 she hand painted chapbook cover art covers using oil paint on card stock which maintained the $5.00 price for her books and included small original works of abstract art. Her goal for 2015 is to publish a collection of poems from her Def Jam Poetry Posts.
She maintains her first poetry board OpenAir to this day, and enjoys writing and sharing poems.
She wrote this,
and left out a bunch of
stuff to save time.
It’s not a poem.
She thinks she will save it and call it “Not a Poem”